BRAVE NEW TODAY Child Conditioning by the �Experts�

In Brave New World , Huxley opens with the fictitious futuristic scene of the �Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center� where children are manufactured through test tubes. Infants are born not to parents, but to the State. In this way, children can be predestined and preconditioned: �All conditioning aims at � making people like their unescapable social destiny,� the director states. In the �Infant Nurseries: Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms,� eight-month-old babies are placed in front of bowls of colorful roses and books opened invitingly at images of fish and birds. As the babies crawl towards these, a nurse presses a lever and a violent explosion and siren can be heard. The children are startled and begin screaming, their faces distort with terror. �Now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock,� the director says. The screaming increases; their little bodies twitch and stiffen. The electroshock and loud noises suddenly stop. The children are offered the flowers and books again. At the mere sight of them, the infants shrink away in terror. The director beams: �They�ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an �instinctive� hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned.�

�Unalterably conditioned� best describes what is being done to students in our classrooms today. Its roots lie in behavioral psychology.

In 1884, Russian psychologist and physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his countryman Vladimir Bekhterev studied in Leipzig University, Germany, under the �Father of Experimental Psychology,� Wilhelm Wundt. They later developed what they called �conditioned reflex� from an infamous series of experiments in which dogs, having learned that food is always accompanied by the ringing of a bell, would thereafter salivate at the bell�s mere sound. Holes were cut in the dogs� cheeks to measure the amount they salivated in response to different stimuli. This laid the groundwork for much of behavioral psychology used in schools today.

Adherents included psychologists John B. Watson and Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Watson, professor and director of the psychological laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1908 to 1920, took Pavlov a step further. Whereas Pavlov was concerned with brain processes, Watson insisted that psychology address �the prediction and control of observable behavior.� All responses, he believed, were the result of outside stimuli and therefore could be controlled by anyone who was able to produce those stimuli.
81 In his book, Psychological Care of Infant and Childin 1928, Watson advised parents that if they wanted the best results in their children, never show them affection. He wrote: �Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. � Remember when you are tempted to pet your child, that mother�s love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument that may inflict a never- healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter�s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.�

After a series of experiments on an 11-month-old infant, Watson said: �Give me the baby, and I�ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood. � I�ll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless.�

Watson�s own child, Albert, epitomized the psychologist�s theory and results. Albert would crawl along the floor, and to condition him, a white rabbit would be let out of a cage. As soon as the rabbit would emerge, Albert would become excited and go towards it. When almost near it, Watson would drop a big steel bar behind him that made him jump and cry. This was done repeatedly until Albert was afraid of anything white or furry�-fear that lasted all of his life. The son of the �Father of Behaviorism� committed suicide in his twenties.

B.F. Skinner modified the tenets of behaviorism to fit his own discoveries that he called �operant conditioning.� �Conditioning� was the research term for learning. �Operant� referred to Skinner�s idea that any organism �operates� on (responds involuntarily to) his environment. In 1948, as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, he published a novel, Walden Two, which described a fictional utopia based on behavioral engineering. Not fictional was his idea that individual freedom didn�t exist. Man�s actions, he said, were nothing more than a set of behaviors shaped by his environment over which he had no control.

As such, he believed people were going to be manipulated. �I just want them to be manipulated effectively,� he said. Skinner used a method of �desensitization� that repeatedly forced the subject to view disturbing images until no anxiety is produced. Eventually, the subject becomes immune (numb) to even the most extreme images.

On his first television appearance, Skinner was asked, �Would you, if you had to choose, burn your children or your books?� He answered that he would burn his children because �his contribution to the future would be greater through his work than through his genes.�

Today, treated in effect like animals, students are numbed by the questionnaires and tests about sex, drugs, behavior, emotions and their mental state.

As Professor Szasz points out: �Psychiatrists have been largely responsible for creating the problems they have ostensibly tried to solve.� They are the last people to whom we should turn to solve the problems of our children.

BEHAVIORISM AND MAN
Seeing no difference between man and animals, behaviorists�-from Pavlov, Watson and Skinner to present-day psychologists�-have performed experiments on dogs and rats for decades. Relying on that dubious research, behaviorism supposedly explains what makes man tick. What is lacking from the subject, however, is any sort of practical, beneficial results for man. By denying the soul, behaviorism and all of psychology�s bogus conclusions are destructive; denigrating the complex nature of human experience to nothing but stimulus-response behavior.

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